Blockchain Governance

Authors: Primavera De Filippi, Wouter Reijers & Morshed Mannan (2024) Publisher: MIT Press

A comprehensive academic treatment of governance in blockchain-based systems, examining how decentralized protocols create new forms of institutional authority and how communities can design legitimate, adaptive governance for distributed networks. The book draws on legal theory, institutional economics, and political philosophy to analyze DAOs, protocol governance, and the relationship between on-chain and off-chain governance.

This book is one of the primary academic outputs of the research trajectory that also produced the Network Nations project. It addresses the institutional dimension of functional sovereignty — how blockchain-based communities can establish and enforce rules, manage resources, and maintain legitimacy without territorial grounding. The authors De Filippi, Mannan, and Reijers are all connected to the Network Nations series.

Referenced in: Network Nations essay